1980s

My True North

My arm is broke off.

2015 is kind of a big year for me.  This is the year I turn 50, as do all my girlfriends with whom I graduated high school.  We’re getting together for a week in October at a beach house in Oak Island, NC, to celebrate and/or commiserate.  By that time, only one of us will still be in her forties, but she’ll be the one who gets to have her birthday while we’re all together.  Maybe it’ll be less traumatizing for her that way.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I kind of lost focus on my memoir.  You’ve probably been wondering, “Geez, when is she going to post another one of those notes?”  Well, wonder no further.  Below is one of the oldest notes in my possession, written in seventh grade by the friend who most recently turned 50.  (You know who you are.)

It is now my goal to have every note transcribed and an agent procured by the time we get together in mid-October.  I’m going to need you to help hold me to that, since I am, at heart, an incredibly lazy person with the attention span of . . . well, Happy Dog.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

(Whose attention span, by the way, has not increased one iota in the past two years since we adopted her.)  I’m really good at starting things with the appropriate amounts of enthusiasm and focus, but not so great at finishing them.  Truly, this is one of my greatest and most crippling faults.  But publishing this book is incredibly important to me, and I fully intend to see it through.

So, without further introduction, I give you:

Oh merd!  Dallas just lost
MERDE & double merde!)

Superbowl Sunday 1/21/78
Heather,
High!  I will be when Dallas wins.  They’re behind now, they had better win.  If they don’t I’ll lost a whole 50¢!
Today would be 7 months.  In this one song on my Helen Reddy record it goes “love and I were strangers til you and I were friends.  Into the shadows of my life, you have brought sympathy and sunshine.  I wish that we could still be friends.”  They later it goes “Broken hearts will mend.”  Maybe, but it sure as hell takes long enough.  (excuse my Français)  Oh, great!  35 to 17.  Looks like I had better get my 50¢ out.  This just helps make all the other little events lately, even betterly worse!  That includes last night; I was going to Grand Visitation with D.G. and another girl, with a lady from our bethel.  We had to go to Alexandria.  As we got close to the off ramp the cute little decided it didn’t want to go.  So here we are all dressed up sitting in the car off the side of the Hiway.  We sat there for about 40 min.  There was another car behind us w/ problems.  We kept watching him get in & out of his car, hoping that if he got his car started he would help us, only if he was nice.  The lady that was driving us is about 25 & her mother had given her this scream thing to have in case someone was after her, so were safe.  (har har)  So finally a tow truck stopped & after about 10 minutes got the car started.  So now we go to Landmark Center & she calls her husband, now it’s about 8:15.  He says he’ll be there in a half hour.  So we’re sitting in the Sears automotive parking lot.  D. starts to read “Cruisin for a Bruisin’” then gets tired of it about 8:30.  So I start reading it.  About 9:20 the ladies husband get there, he’s going to follow us home.  So for starters we get on the wrong road.  I continue using the headlights behind us to see.  Finally we get here at 10:15, I stepped out of the car & into a cute little puddle about 20 (maybe 30) feet deep, in my good shoes and freeze my feet off, but the husband guy got out of his truck to tell his wife something and thought it’d be cool to just skate on over . . . so he crashed to the ground.  The End.
My arm is killing me to death.  I have to go to the dentist at 9:15 to get my teeth cleaned.  My dentist, Dr. Repole, is the foxyest (sp) guy!  Tall . . . Dark . . . &&&&& HANDSOME!!!!!!
I have to go.  My arm is broke off.
W/B/soon
C-ya round
C.
Now to fold this sucker!
K’s playing restaurant, Miklshakes are $10 & Chinese food is $50!!!!

My True North

Some idiot on Uranus

H,
Il ya trios très, très étudiants ennyue (‘cuz 2 boys) dans cette class.  (There are 3 very, very bored students in this class.)  J.S, C.R. & Moi.  HELP!  I’m all done with my homeowork so I is faking doing it in order to fill my desire to write to you.  The 3 of us elected not to take the test.  Ain’t we smart?  We get to put it off until Friday.  Mr. C (hope he doesn’t come over here) gave us a lecture on things to come.  Blew my mind!  Talk about things from outer space!  Some idiot on Uranus decided to give us these stupid formulas to confuse us and weaken our minds.  Then they’re gonna invade our souls!  Watch out!  I feel them crawling through my skull!  Help!
Oh-oh!  National emergency.  Here he comes.  Gotta go for a sec.  Hope you studied some more for the spelling test.  I didn’t.  I guess I’d better if I have time after bestowing you with my wonderous flow of elegant & colloquial vocabulary & enhancing your unfortunate surroundings.
I’ve been thinking about it, & I really do want my jewelry back.  I really love my Frampton ring, my French ring & my skeleton necklace; plus the others.  Problem:  I don’t want to create trouble.  I’m almost sure that that’s the girl who took my stuff.  If I see her again & she has my stuff, I’m gonna get Mr. P.  No, Ms. H.  She’s more into it.  I really don’t want to get beat up, but I’ve got to look at the bright(?) side of things.  Maybe it’ll improve my looks.  If not, then at least I’ll have a ligit excuse to cover my face.  Also, I’ve wanted to get in a good knock-down fight, but it’s just be dreaming.  I certainly don’t want a gang fight.  At least I never go anywhere alone.  Maybe they’re like C.W.; all words but no action.  I sure hope so.
I gotta game today.  I’m soooooo nervous!  This is gonna be the real test if I made the team, what string, & what position.  So far I’ve been playing left & right wing, 1st string, no substitutes.  But with my ankle, I don’t don’t know.  I usually don’t express pain very well, even if I’m dying.  So when I mutter & complain ‘bout something, that means it seriously hurts.  And this is about to do me in.  I’m in so much pain & agony.  It hurt so bad to walk down the stairs.  Going up is not too bad, there’s not much pressure on my foot.  But going down, “THUD”, it hurts like merde.  I don’t know how I’m going to play today.  Is it better to be a benchwarmer or play crappily?  Maybe I’ll play then keel over when I inevitably get kicked in the same place.  Make it look good.
Well, I’ve got 30 seconds ‘til the bell rings.  Luv ya,
C. briiing

Organizing these notes first by school year, then by writer, made it easy for me to see patterns in their subject matter.  These are the main topics I noticed, in order of their prominence:

  • Boys
  • Girlfriends and associated activities (sleepovers, roller skating, shopping, bicycle-riding, watching soap operas)
  • Academia (classes, homework, tests, teachers, grades, extracurricular activities)
  • Popular culture (movies, music, products, TV shows, etc.)
  • Family/parents/siblings
  • Riding the bus

If I were to make a word cloud out of the above topics, “Boys” would be in, like, 150-point font, and everything else would be maybe 14-point.

C. has been one of my closest friends since sixth grade.  She was a competitive athlete and our class valedictorian.  Needless to say, much of the content of her notes has to do with A) field hockey and soccer practices and games, and B) classes, tests, homework and grades.  As you can see, she also took French, as did several other of my girlfriends.  I was quite vexed when they wrote in French, because the only French words I knew were “moi,” “bonjour,” “adieu,” and “merde.”  (I took four years of German, which was far more useful in my very ethnic family.)

By the way, I selected the title phrase because I recently shared a Facebook post entitled “What is Uranus Made Of?” on Husband’s Wall.  We’ve been asking each other this question for weeks.  It never gets old.

My True North

Finding my way back to me. For realsies.

Recently, while Husband was on a business trip, I re-watched “Julie & Julia.”  I still like the book way better than the movie.  But this time Julie Powell’s experience really spoke to me.  Here’s why:

My family and friends know that I’m a little . . . um . . . different, and that one of the more irritating characteristics of this difference is my obsession with the past.  Apparently I started working on this obsession at an early age because, from seventh grade through twelfth grade, I saved close to 600 notes my girlfriends and I passed to each other during those years.  These notes have moved cross-country with me multiple times, biding their time in a large plastic storage bin with other assorted detritus from the 1970s and 1980s.  I’ve transcribed more than 400 of them since December, and they’re going in my book My True North:  Finding My Way Back To Me.

I’m not going to commit to releasing one note every day for the next year, like Julie Powell cooked her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  But I am going to dive in and hope you enjoy this as much as I know I will.  I figure if so many others can morph from bloggers to book writers, so can I.

1/23/78
H,
Well here I am babysitting again. My mom found out that we broke-up. She said D’s mom told her that she didn’t think that we were getting along or something. My mom kept asking me why he didn’t come over or call, all I said was “don’t know.” Then she kept asking me if there was another girl. I said “I don’t know” (as usual.) This dumb dog is jumping all over the house (she’s about as big as a wild boar & acts like one) I didn’t exactly tell her that we broke up cause she thinks that “going together” is what you do when you’re about 18 or 17 maybe 16 or 15. So if I tell her that, she’ll tell a long stupid story or sompin’. My mom says that I shouldn’t like just one boy. So I told her “Well, T.’s nice & P. plays tennis. And then there’s T. but he’s taken.” So then she says, well just be sure that there nice. Then I told her what a butt & a jerk S. is. She tells me to be nice to him. Like hell! (‘scuse my Portugese) She says that . . . . Better just tell ya. Re-mind me to.
Bye—W/B
C

We were in seventh grade when this was written.  As you can see, things haven’t changed much in more than 30 years–except maybe the means of communication.  We’ve gone from pen and paper to texting and tweeting.  One of the things I hope to get across in the coming months is how blessed I feel for having access to this window into the past through the pages of these notes.  Most other people may not care about reliving times like these (or even want to), but I enjoy it immensely.  It’s both entertaining and humbling.